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A dredge scoops mud off the bottom of Bayou Postillion and piles it on the banks in this 2005 photo. Fisherman Jody Meche of Henderson and Atchafalaya Basinkeeper’s Dean Wilson of Bayou Sorrel were among those testifying to the enviornmental damage caused by spoil banks, especially those with inadequate gaps like those shown above. (Louisiana Department of Natural Resources)

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Whistleblower Dan S. Collins, flanked by his wife, Marian L. Pyle (left), and attorney Crystal G. Bounds of Jill Craft, Esq., Baton Rouge. (Meghan Collins Savage)

Atchafalaya Basin canal exposed in court

Jury levies $750,000 judgement against DNR
Ken Grissom

A state district court jury Friday awarded a whistleblower $750,000 in damages after finding that the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (DNR) retaliated against him for reporting environmental violations in an Atchafalaya Basin water quality project.
The plaintiff, Dan Collins, a professional landman, testified that DNR used over a million dollars of Atchafalaya Basin Program money to dredge a canal for private oil and gas interests – an assertion Collins says fell on deaf ears in the offices of the state’s inspector general and attorney general.
The Bayou Postillion project is a three-mile canal in Iberia Parish dredged to depths and widths that would accommodate barged drilling rigs. It follows the course of a natural bayou from the Morgan City-Port Allen section of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway westward into a rich natural gas field. Dredged early in 2005, it was touted by the Atchafalaya Basin Program (ABP), a division of DNR, as a model for future water quality projects in the Basin.
Collins, who was on the stand for fully two of the four days of testimony, was hired by DNR to get permission from all of the landowners along both sides of the bayou for the state to deposit spoil from the dredging on their lands. He testified that a “red flag popped up” when he learned that these same landowners, an extended family bundled into a corporation, also had vast interests in the adjacent oil and gas field. Also, the canal was dredged wider and deeper than originally proposed for the stated purpose of funneling fresh river water into the swamps and enhancing navigation for sportsmen and commercial fishermen.
Among the exhibits introduced by Collins’ attorney, Crystal Bounds of Baton Rouge, was a memorandum written by Ernie Gammon, chairman of the ABP’s Channel Maintenance Committee, about a meeting he had with Newman Trowbridge, CEO of the Bayou Postillion landowners’ legal entity, Kyle/Peterman Management Corp. Trowbridge, now deceased, was a well-connected Lafayette attorney. Gammon, in addition to his role as a volunteer with ABP, is a Baton Rouge consultant with nearly a million dollars in DNR contracts under his belt, including one for monitoring the dredging at Bayou Postillion.
“Newman (the Peterman family) is interested in seeing this work done as a means of facilitating future oil and gas exploration work in the area,” Gammon wrote. “(He wants the channel excavated so that drilling rigs can navigate Bayou Postillion.)”
Collins testified that he also became concerned that the federal Clean Water Act was being violated by spoil banks that were too high and with inadequate gaps for the circulation of fresh water into the swamps, and that the spoil servitude he had been hired to obtain – a task that Trowbridge took onto himself – was invalid because Trowbridge had simply erased the names of landowners who had not signed on.
He notified his superiors at DNR, eventually getting an audience with then-Secretary of DNR Scott Angelle, who Collins said “looked right through me.” Undeterred, Collins went to the office of State Inspector General Stephen B. Street, where, he testified, he was told that office was not qualified to investigate an “engineering problem.”
Collins testified that he wound up face-to-face with Attorney General Buddy Caldwell, who, according to the testimony, told him “He could only investigate what Gov. Jindal wants. And Gov. Jindal did not want to investigate.”
Under direct examination by defense attorney Patrick McIntire of Lafayette, Ryan Seideman, an assistant attorney general, testified that he had personally examined the evidence produced by Collins and found “no wrongdoing.”
While there were no ABP news releases proclaiming it, the fact the Bayou Postillion dredge was designed to accommodate oil and gas traffic was no secret. The spoil servitude agreement between the state and Kyle/Peterman Management Corp., a public document signed by Trowbridge and Gov. Kathleen Blanco, contains this sentence: “State acknowledges that the navigation channel to be constructed, improved and/or maintained through the Channel will be utilized as an access route by oil and gas operators conducting exploration and development activities on the adjacent lands of private owners.”
Testifying for the defense in last week’s trial, Gammon said that while oil and gas operations were never a consideration in his committee’s selection of Bayou Postillion for dredging, the “landowner’s cooperation was vital.”
Robert Benoit, ABP assistant director at the time (now chief of staff at DNR), testified, for the defense, that widening and deepening the channel at the landowners’ request “only enhances the project” for its original intended purpose.
After several years of complaints about the Bayou Postillion project, Collins said, what had been relatively steady employment with DNR began to dwindle and then dry up. He testified that he believed he was placed in “delinquent contractor” status, thus unable to obtain future contracts, by a deliberate omission on the part of DNR. Moreover, he said he was ridiculed by his former superiors, including Robert Benoit, who said laminated maps he produced to bolster his case “would make good place mats.”
McIntire’s co-defense attorney, Robin Magee, also of Lafayette, said in opening arguments the whole case hinged on three elements: 1) was Collins a bona fide employee of DNR; 2) was there an environmental violation; and 3) was there retaliation by DNR against Collins. She and McIntire called a succession of witnesses to attest that the answer to each question was no.
They challenged Collins’ status as a public employee, an integral element of an environmental whistleblower suit, with evidence he that he did not draw a W-2 from DNR, nor get paid vacations.
They called employees and former employees to explain why Collins began getting less work – in two cases because he had failed to completely fill out the proposal, and generally, testified Benoit, “there just weren’t that many contracts.”
They also produced a witness, Gammon, who stated that the gaps in the spoil bank were made smaller than originally called for to save cypress and tupelo trees.
In contrast to the defense’s parade of buttoned-down bureaucrats, the plaintiff called a motley crew of environmentalists, crawfishermen and scientists who made the transformation of Bayou Postillion the centerpiece of their testimony.
“It was about enhancing an oil field rather than water quality,” said Harold Schoeffler of Lafayette, chairman of the Sierra Club Acadian Group. “It was a big waste of money and destruction of valuable natural habitat. The bottom of a canal is an ecological dead zone.”
Presiding over the case was 19th Judicial District Judge Wilson Fields.

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